Contrary to Senate President David Williams' continuing efforts to deceive Kentuckians, all the available evidence strongly supports Beshear's proposal to offset the money shifted from next year's budget to this year's with savings from implementing a managed care approach to Medicaid at the start of the next fiscal year.
All the proof Williams has to the contrary are the misleading words coming from his own mouth and the mouths of his Republican parrots in the Senate.
Williams and those parrots are totally responsible for the breakdown of House-Senate talks in the regular session that ended last week. They are totally responsible for the wasteful cost of the ongoing special session. And they will be totally responsible if Medicaid recipients and providers suffer the painful consequences of huge reimbursement reductions from April 1 through June 30.
The Courier-Journal added this:
Sen. Williams — whose proposal to cover the Medicaid shortfall by imposing additional, across-the-board cuts to already strapped state agencies, including schools, lost even Republican support in the House — actually proposed a public debate with the Governor over their positions on dealing with the budget shortfall. A debate now? Really?
That suggestion pretty much proves that Sen. Williams' campaign season against Gov. Beshear started early, well before GOP voters sealed the deal by giving the Burkesville legislator their nomination. (In doing so, Sen. Williams also is re-coining a political term: He is a presumptuous nominee.) It also pretty much proves that everything, even the state's business, is toast when it comes too close to Sen. Williams' overheated personal ambitions.
The people of Kentucky need to remember who hung up state business on the road to political advancement, and who used his bully pulpit to bully, as they weigh the candidates' performance through the year.
